Wynne takes the lead on sex-education reforms

Waterloo Region Record

Give Ontario’s new Liberal premier full marks for coaxing teachers out of their extracurricular corner and back into the coach’s corner. But there’s something else Kathleen Wynne will soon be graded on.

Not just extracurricular, but also curricular activities — notably her promise to update Ontario’s outdated sex-education curriculum.

Now that Wynne is slowly cleaning up Dalton McGuinty’s mess with teachers’ unions, can she also undo the damage done by Premier Dad when he allowed gay-baiting reactionaries to quash curriculum reforms three years ago?

Remember the contrived uproar? The education minister of the day — who happened to be Wynne — had the guts and gumption to propose modernizing sex-education for students in earlier grades, until she was shuffled out of the portfolio by McGuinty. Wilting due to performance anxiety (of the political kind), he prematurely deep-sixed sex education reforms.

It was a gutless decision, but with an election looming McGuinty made a nakedly political calculation to play footsie with socially conservative voters. He’d watched Tory leader Tim Hudak aligning himself shamelessly with the likes of Charles McVety, the sexuality-obsessed and politically repressed televangelist who scaremongered about sex-education in our schools.

There’s no stopping McVety’s ravings (He was rebuked in late 2010 by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for falsely claiming, in attacking Wynne’s proposals, that gays and lesbians prey on children.)

One might at least hope his bilious homophobia wouldn’t find another echo among Hudak’s Tories.

The reality is that sex of any kind is on the upswing in our swinging schools, with or without sex-education. More importantly, sex-talk is the rage, not just in high school hallways but elementary schoolyards: little girls hear it among their classmates, who are picking it up from their older siblings, who, in turn, pick it up online — not from any sex-education curriculum.

That’s why it’s time to modernize the curriculum — not so much bringing it into the 21stcentury as taking account of the internet era. Depriving children of thoughtful, appropriate educational materials leaves them ill-equipped to cope with our online world.

That’s why Wynne believes McGuinty was wrong to overrule her. And why she now intends to pick up where she left off.

Her government will resume consultations with parents’ associations and advisory groups “to get the new curriculum out and implemented,” she told me during the leadership campaign. Every part of the curriculum “has to evolve.”

When I asked her about McGuinty’s judgment on the issue, Wynne paused for eight seconds before replying, pointedly: “You know, I don’t believe that reacting to someone like Charles McVety is ever the right thing to do.”

Will McVety once again play the homophobia-pedophilia card? More importantly, will the Tories lower themselves to his level? At their own risk.

It’s one thing to make vulgar accusations against an image-conscious Premier Dad figure. It’s quite another to repeat those loaded allegations with Wynne at the helm.

The lay of the land has changed. They are now up against a grandmother-premier who may be wearing, paradoxically, protective armour as the province’s first leader who’s a lesbian. Wynne boasts a bio that Ontarians seem belatedly proud of — and that may give the Tories pause before they join any more prehistoric, pre-internet McVety crusades.

Is Ontario ready for an updated sex-education curriculum in 2013? That reminds me of the question I posed to Liberal delegates a month ago, when many people thought the idea of a gay premier was a long-shot.

You won’t know until you try.

Martin Regg Cohn is a news services columnist who writes on provincial affairs.